


The Wake

by Dragunov



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Doomed Fluff, Ficlet, M/M, Sebastian you are a sad bastard, Some Fluff, Trippy dreamstuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-04-10
Updated: 2013-01-11
Packaged: 2017-11-03 09:29:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 690
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/379905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dragunov/pseuds/Dragunov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sebastian dreams that Jim is dead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

He dreams that Jim is dead.

He is a child again, and he is climbing the largest tree at his family estate. Jim is there. Jim is ahead of him, higher in the shadow of the leaves, his little feet and little hands and little limbs grasping at thinner and thinner branches for leverage. Sebastian struggles to follow. A strong wind blows. Leaves rustle with the sound of skin brushing against skin, but a thousand skins, a thousand bodies, and like a single clap of applause above him a branch breaks. One mistake. One overestimated step.

Jim falls.

Sebastian can not catch him. No one ever gets to Jim, he says. No one ever will. And when he gathers the courage to look, boy Jim is lying on the floor of an Indian jungle, slow puddle of blood flowing from the back of his head. A tiger is circling the carnage and Sebastian screams that he’ll kill the cat if it so much as licks the corpse and suddenly the tiger is Jim smiling at him and just as suddenly the tiger is Sherlock Holmes. All three are the same.

He feels this strange feeling at the edges of his dream, where his dream rots, and the rot warbles to him that he has had this dream before. That he has been having this dream his whole life but when he wakes he won’t remember it.

He descends from the tree and finds himself standing on the rooftop of a hospital, standing in the sleet. The body is a man now, dressed in an expensive suit, Jim Moriarty, consulting criminal, king, god, and his eyes are wide open, staring at nothing. God is dead, and it’s survival of the fittest. Sebastian bends over and begins to claw those black eyes from their skull. He pops them in his mouth.

The sunlight wakes him and for a moment of panic Jim isn’t in the bed where he should be but then Sebastian smells coffee brewing and sighs.

When he walks into the kitchen Jim accuses him of tossing and turning too much in his sleep. “What silly dream did you dream?” He asks.

“I don’t remember.” Sebastian says. And he doesn’t.

He takes in the sight of Jim, half dressed, seated with his legs crossed on the kitchen counter, cradling a cup of sugared coffee, black hair in complete disarray, bathed in the white morning sun, and he is seized with a crushing, inexplicable terror. He presses his lips to the back of Jim’s head. Breathes in his hair. And Jim tenses, then leans back.

“Make me pancakes.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I write too many drabbles as it is, so I tacked this one onto an already existing drabble rather than create an entirely new fic for it.

Newton’s third law of motion, which is, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, and any green rifleman with a bruised shoulder can feel the equation from the tips of his trigger finger, to the body that slumps lifeless behind a dirt berm in Afghanistan and when the combat stress specialist asks him, awkward and indelicate, “What do you feel when you kill a man?” Sebastian Moran, brows raised as to say _really_ , smirking as he tears open a coffee sachet from his ration pack, pours the crystals into his water bottle and says, evenly, “Recoil.”

And in the end, the entropy of the universe tends to a maximum, Jim Moriarty says to him, “and that,” fingers caressing a book of fairytales, fingers wrapped around the grip of a gun, “is the motive power of _fire_.”

Jim loves him like flame loves the heretic, and Sebastian is the physical reaction that takes men from the state of living to dead, and Jim is the chemical reaction that burns London cold. Sebastian loves Jim like Jim is the machine that can prove any statement to be true or false and Jim whispers against his skin “I am lying to you,” but he believes. A bullet fires and the gun recoils. The recoil is the result of action-reaction force pairs. As the gases from the gunpowder explosion expand, the gun pushes the bullet forward and the bullet pushes the gun backward. Jim Moriarty falls. And Sebastian Moran stands, rifle still loaded, alone.


End file.
